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Subject : The way MTA handles archives with files that have attributes
Target  : All users
Date    : 11-14-92
Rev.    : 1.00 / 11-14/92
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There are much questions about the way MTA handles special attributes
like READONLY, SYSTEM and HIDDEN, that are set on files that are inside
archives.

MTA can do 2 things:

- Ignore the archive (manual conversion is needed);

- Convert the archives but reset the attributes to ARCHIVE or NONE;

It is impossible to keep the attributes when MTA converts the file.
The main reasons are:

- Only ARJ, SQZ and ZIPP support ALL attributes, the other archive
  programs can either support no special attributes at all or only
  a few (READONLY or HIDDEN, most can't support SYSTEM);

- HYPER can add but never extract any of these files (major bug in
  HYPER);

- ARJ can extract RO/HI/SY but will make a mess of the target files
  (never got it right);

- ARJ can compress RO/HI/SY but without a move;

- LZH can compress but the decompress is a mess (some attibutes are
  gone);


In general, the conversion of RO/HI/SY attributes has a large number
of flaws. The main problem is, that you can never be sure that all
files are added to the new archive (or I have to use a large number
of bytes in memory to deal with it in an intelligent way).

When you set the REPORTSPECIALATTRIBUTES option (without any parameter),
MTA will reset all READONLY, SYSTEM and HIDDEN attributes (a report will
be in the log-file) and will continue conversion. If you use the SKIP
parameter with this option, MTA will leave the archive alone and will
continue with the next eligable file. The conversion must be done by
hand.